Saf

Sunday Best

Cismigiu Gardens Every time I visit this place, I feel the same. Maybe it’s because the elegant flower beds, the winding paths and the chatter of happy kids. Or maybe it’s the young lovers who paddle rowing boats, the skeletal old ladies who gossip on benches of battered

The Bucharest Of Recurrent Pathologies

top row: around Bishopric St. , Capşa restaurant, Magheru Blvd. , in Cismigiu gardens (see also Them in Gallery) If we take an X-ray of the articles published by the major Romanian dailies, we get an overwhelming abundance of unsettling, grotesque events created by outbursts

A Puzzled City

Bucharest is a city that is difficult to describe, and difficult is a term that tends to suggest the word impossible. Many of us have probably at least once in our lifetime been in the situation of talking about the city that we live in. And, just as probable, among the

Gambrinus Ale House, A Stylish Ruin

Peeled off plaster, broken windows, rats scuttling at ease day and night. And above all, the filth. Complete and utter filth reigning supreme over a piece of downtown Bucharest. But also over a piece of our past. The only part still living is the sign above the door, reading

Michel Bührer: Cannibal City

Michel Bührer: Bucharest A Cannibal City and White Billboards exhibition at the National Museum of Contemporary Art, 10-11 2008 Bucharest, a “Little Paris” of the ghettoThe exhibition of the Swiss Journalist Michel Bührer, Bucharest, a Cannibal City/White Billboards

Dazzling

excerpt Beyond this second row of buildings, the town sprawled out to the horizon, covering half the window with an increasingly minced, confusing, indistinct, random mixture of the vegetal and architectural, with poplars’ spears soaring up here and there, and strange

Bucharest – Little Summit In Paris

I hadn't wanted to leave Bucharest during the NATO summit (2-4 April, 2008). Why should I have left? I'd have left after and not before it. To me Bucharest seems to be now exactly how it should be all the time. Less traffic in the center, more traffic on the outskirts

A Showcase For Kalodont

Gregor von Rezzori has never been part of Romanian-German literature, a fact regretted even beyond his death. The writer, who was born in 1914 in Czernowitz and died in 1998 in his home in Florence, would have, nonetheless, met some of the conditions for qualification. But,

The Friend From Abroad

Clockwise from top left: People's House, wood church in Romanian Peasant Museum yard, Opera House, Stavropoleos Church, Athenaeum, Caru cu bere pub. Every time I have to recommend some sightseeing in our town to the friend/ acquaintance/ work colleague coming from

Brâncuşi Y Su Influencia En La Escultura Del Siglo XX

El escultor más importante de la primera mitad delsiglo XX fue sin duda alguna Constantin Brancusi(1876 – 1957), un rumano… (Howard Hibbard, Obras maestras de la escultura – la plástica europea y americana de la Edad Media hasta el presente, Nueva York, 1977) Preámbulo 

Breve Confesion

Tengo ganas de escribir sólo cuando estoy en un estado explosivo, con fiebre o en crispación, en un estupor convertido en frenesí, en un clima de disputas en el cual las invectivas reemplazan las bofetadas y los golpes. Esto suele comenzar así: un leve temblor que va

Playing With The Past

A Word with Two Meanings We invent words, then let ourselves be subjugated by them. There would be no knowledge without words, but it is words again that grow into independent entities, obstacles that come between us and the real world. They move us closer to and at the